The Cassie Chronicles - Prologue
by Novelist71
Summary: Set after the events at the end of 'Infinity War', the story features the struggle Cassie Lang goes through, in order to survive the desolate world Thanos has created, by wiping out half the planet's population, and her eventual part in the battle to end the mad Titan's reign of terror.
1. Prologue

Avengers: Endgame – The Cassie Chronicles

Prologue

In the back seat of Jim's car, Cassie was answering science and technology questions – that her mother, Maggie – kept throwing her way. A proud, toothy smile appeared on her face, every time her daughter got one correct. Jim, meanwhile, was thinking about how one of Cassie's ex-babysitters – Monica Kedonski – had started work as an officer at his precinct, as he listened to his step-daughter come out with facts he'd never heard before. Science wasn't his strong suit, but that never stopped him being as proud of Cassie as her biological parents – his girlfriend and her ex-husband – Scott Lang – were. This thought was suddenly interrupted by the vehicle in front of his inexplicably spinning out of control. He was forced to swerve to the right to avoid a possible road accident. The car's front right wheel mounted the pavement, slightly elevating Det. Paxton's automobile.

"Are you okay?" he asked his passengers.

"We're fine" said Maggie and Cassie in unison.

Jim got out of his car, ready to give the reckless driver hell. Reaching the vehicle that'd put those he loves in danger, he banged heavily on the driver's window. It was then that he realized no-one was at the wheel.

"What the hell?" said Paxton, looking around inside. Floating around the interior were tiny particles. He was about to grab some of them, when yelling and screaming from outside reached his ears.

He rushed over to the car he'd temporarily exited. That's when he saw what was causing the horrified-sounding commotion. Pedestrians and people who'd gotten out of their vehicles started to dissolve into a dust-like substance. Maggie and her 11 year-old offspring simultaneously heard a strange mechanical noise. Cassie left the car too and gazed around to see where it was coming from. She then pinpointed its location.

The noise emanated from a passenger jet which had been holding its present course. Without warning, the pilots disintegrated, leaving nobody at the controls. The plane then started to spin relentlessly towards the ground, losing altitude at a swift rate. Seeing it was heading to the section of the road they were in, Jim and Maggie yelled "Run!" to Cassie. This she did, without fail. This escape prevented her watching her mum and her second dad evaporate. They were gone as the aircraft continued to fall from the sky. Part of the sprint back to Paxton's house took her through an alley that separated two rows of rear gardens. In the distance, she saw the Golden Gate Bridge.

Cassie was halfway down the street towards Fisherman's Wharf, when she heard a massive explosion. A quarter of a mile behind her, all the cars on the road at the time of the plane's deadly descent were now lumps of burning metal, including the one Jim had been driving.

She envisaged what the scene was like as she neared San Francisco's seafood district. The horror of it immediately found her – a feeling intensified by the sight of more and more people being unfathomably vaporized. Soon, just a small number of individuals remained. Cassie quickly ascertained the pattern of these bizarre disappearances: not everyone was becoming a human dust cloud. Her mind had to cope with a grownup situation. She felt fear like she'd never done in the past. Cassie tried to outrun it, by heading back to where she'd been living since her real dad was sent to prison. She spotted on open window, and put together a makeshift tower out of wooden boxes. It was tall enough to get four fifths of the way there. The rest of the climb was somewhat precarious, but Cassie's coordination led her to overcome an obstacle that threatened to send her to the hospital. She dashed over to a corner not visible from the door to this room. There, Cassie sat down, burying her head in her folded arms.

"Please let this be a nightmare," she said, over and over, "so I can wake up from it."

Her wish fell on deaf ears. Through the window that was ajar, she was forced to listen to the hysteria fade into the sound of stone-cold silent disbelief. There was the odd whimper, but Cassie couldn't even be sure she'd heard that. Over the next 10 minutes, she inherited the mood the survivors of this catastrophe had been left with. The noiseless emotions were still there, though. She felt her tears ricochet down her cheeks. The tracks left by them darkened the pink tone of her face's skin. The sensation turned into the coldest type of anguish. Cassie didn't fight the feeling. She let it besiege her, so that acclimatizing herself to solitude would be easier.

That process swallowed the rest of the day. By nine at night, Cassie was sitting on her bed, still in her day clothes. She wasn't crying anymore, merely staring straight ahead. When her eyes deviated a little to the left, she saw the journal her mum and Jim had bought her a fortnight ago. Driven by a need she never knew she had, Ant-Man's daughter opened it at the first page and picked up a pen lying to its right. She began reciting what she wanted to put down on the top line, including today's date.

"Something's bad is happening around me. I'm scared. I'm alone, alone, alone!"


	2. Chapter 2

Avengers: Endgame – The Cassie Chronicles

Chapter 1

4 YEARS LATER

Coming from the kitchen Maggie used to make meals in, Cassie was carrying a lit match. On a small coffee table she was walking towards was a solitary cup cake. The peach coloured icing had her age written on it in chocolate cream – a task she'd done herself for the past 3 years. It was her 16th birthday, a part of her life she wanted to acknowledge. She didn't care that she had no-one to share it with, or any parcels to open. The latter reality reminded how alone she'd been these past few years. To make peace with that, Cassie chose to avoid anything that made it real. Her natural father, her surrogate dad, her mum, friends, everyone she knew... all gone. She blew out the candle without singing "Happy Birthday", or even making a wish. Cassie didn't feel either happy or hopeful. All that was keeping her from falling apart was living day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month.

The way she perceived it, her life was already a shadow of its former self. Cassie didn't see the point in making her predicament worse.

Once the cupcake was in her tummy, she slid out her mobile and activated the voice recording app on it.

"My name is Cassie Lang. The 4th anniversary of 'The Snap' went down 2 days ago. The number of people attending was the same – 213. That's all that remains of the population of San Francisco. The ceremony was full of those who'd lost loved ones. I stood there sharing their melancholy. Everyone that mattered to me I lost. I also shared in their hatred for the one who'd caused..."

Through the window closest to her, something caught her eye. A large group of people were encircling a telegraph pole. She stopped the recording and ventured into the street to see why they were gathering.

A flyer pasted there, showing the head and shoulders of Captain America, was why they were congregating. Many of those staring at it quickly formed dismayed expressions. The purpose wasn't to put forward a plan to reverse 'The Snap', but to offer hope to these left behind. The general consensus from the people who'd assembled there was none to be had.

Cassie was the sole person left gazing at the poster. Everyone else walked away, one-by-one. She understood why they weren't keen on sticking around. A half-empty Earth was the new normal.

12 MONTHS AFTER

Over the course of the next year, Cassie accidentally found herself taking on the role of teen counselor. Two sisters – aged 15 and 17 – came to her door. Like Cassie, they'd lost their parents. The word got around and more orphans started looking to her for to help them. A disused warehouse became the venue for this support group.

Cassie had just come from such a meeting. She was about to go back inside, but someone behind her said "Cassie Lang". The shock of hearing another person use her name after all this time made here turn around. Standing on the front lawn was Jemma Simmons.

"Who are you?" Cassie asked defensively – the tone highlighted how wary of strangers. None of them had done that until now.

"Agent Jemma Simmons"

"The Feds or the CIA"

"S.H.I.E.L.D"

"My mom said the organization collapsed when I was in kindergarten"

"It was rebuilt"

"How do you know who I am?"

"Your name's in the dossier S.H.I.E.L.D has on your dad" Jemma said, whilst lifting the document out from a black satchel in her left hand. "We best go inside. I can't show the file's contents out here."

"You so need to look around you, Agent Simmons, there's no-one left in this neighborhood to spy on us"

The way Cassie delivered her response lacked any friendliness. Her personal tragedies robbed her of the sunny, optimistic persona she'd had as a child. Sophomore hormones had kicked in, even though she wasn't yet in that age group. Agent Simmons took her point, but still insisted that the pair of them head inside.

"Coffee" Scott's daughter enquired, once in what was now her kitchen and hers alone.

"Do you have tea?"

She rummaged through three cupboards, in search of this beverage.

"Only herbal – mom was into that"

"I'm sorry about your mum" stated Jemma, hearing Cassie use the past-tense in regards to Maggie's existence.

"I can't afford to grieve anymore, Agent Simmons"

"I get what you mean"

Cassie immediately set about changing the subject.

"Why do you want to show me a file on my dad?"

"Because something was added after your father was snapped..."

Working out that this might be an inappropriate comment, she broke off.

"You can just say it – my dad was killed by Thanos."

Jemma couldn't help but be shocked how broken Cassie had become, but she didn't see herself as in a place she could judge her manner.

"Herbal's okay, Cassie"

"What was added to the S.H.I.E.L.D dossier?"

When asking that, Cassie hadn't heard of that term. New as it was to her vocabulary, it still found its way into the question.

"This"

She unfolded one of the documents in the file. In front of Cassie's eyes, it became a coffee table-sized set of schematics. There was no doubt over what these were the plans for – a suit almost identical to the one she'd seen her dad wear, except it was designed for a young woman.

"Is that the Wasp suit?" Cassie asked, lacking the childlike enthusiasm the mere mention of it gave her.

"It's a prototype – probably meant for you"

"No, Agent Simmons, it's not"

"I'm not with you"

"The last heart-to-heart my dad and I had, he told me he wouldn't be a very good parent if he let me be Ant-Girl. So, I'm honoring his attempt to look out for me"

Agent Simmons pondered Cassie's reaction for a second, and then placed the dossier back in the satchel. She wrote down her mobile number and handed it to Cassie, as she walked out of Paxton's house. A goodbye was absent from her departure, but Jemma chose not to make an issue out of it.

Jemma's visit had unintentionally left her feeling emotionally vulnerable again. Eager to remedy this sensation, she made herself the cup of herbal tea she'd intended to make for Agent Simmons. Cassie made the hot beverage last nearly an hour. It was lukewarm when she took a final sip. She put the cup on her mum's coffee table and tried to fathom why Simmons thought she could be the next Wasp. A knock on the door cut off her introspection.

She wearily got to her feet. When her eyes lined up with the front door, Cassie saw what looked like the face of her father outside. Resigned to this in all probability being a projected memory, she slowly walked towards the downstairs hallway. She blinked, which was her way of trying to shake this mirage. Halfway there, however, her notion began to change. The facial features failed to seem ethereal. The nearer she got, the more her heart's rhythm started to alter. The face she was seeing wasn't static; there was genuine movement on it. 2 foot from the door, the emotion that'd been dormant began to rise rapidly to the surface. Tears were starting to well up as she opened the door. Suddenly certain it was him, her hands cradled the back of Scott's head. The banks burst and she experienced tearful joy.

"Dad...you're alive" she said, barely able to get the words out.

"Cassie" he replied, adding "You're so big", after they hugged.

Her nervous laugh ended five years of living on her own.


End file.
